Retail + Digital

Tag Archives: showrooming

More and more digital brands want to lay down physical roots and create their own permanent stores. At the same time, retailers are ramping up online sales initiatives for increasingly digitally savvy shoppers. So now we have the trend to make showroom-style spaces resemble highly curated homes and apartments. Which makes us want to buy everything and move in.

Freunde von FreundenApartment

Luxury apartments:

The trend for homely retailing has evolved over the last year or so, kick-started by luxury players such as Louis Vuitton with its decadent Hong Kong L’Appartement by Andre Fu, and the personal shopping bachelor pad at Holt Renfrew’s new men only Toronto flagship.

L’Appartement Louis Vuitton, by Andre Fu

After opening their relaxed, sun-drenched LA flagship, complete with outdoor pool, The Olsen Twins are eyeing a similarly homely retail destination in NY’s Upper East Side, according to WWD. Ashley Olsen described the LA store as ‘about setting it up as a home and just having the apparel be a part of the space.’

Curated room-tailing:

Stylists Vanessa Traina and Morgan Wendelborn set up US e-commerce site The Line in 2013 as a place to showcase their personal style across homeware, fashion and beauty products. They launched The Apartment, an airy Soho loft space, shortly after as a physical embodiment of the site, where customers can meet with the creatives behind labels stocked, and the pair host discussions, workshops and screenings. This form of curated, one-to-one apartment-style selling adds a valuable aesthetic layer to the online shopping experience, where customers are buying into a lifestyle not just a product range. Whistles has taken a similar approach, hosting its last two seasonal press days in penthouse lofts in London.

The Line Apartment

Alex Eagle is the eclectic curator behind Soho House’s newest retail location, The Store in Berlin. There is a stylish lifestyle edit with bit of everything on offer, from designer fashion and accessories, contemporary furniture, homewares and organic food from The Store Kitchen as well as beauty services from Barbour & Parlour. It’s designed in the style of a relaxing, homely loft apartment with soft velvet sofas and ‘shabby luxe’ workstations next to the library of books and magazines provided by Idea Books. There’s a florist by Mary Lennox and music by The Vinyl Factory. Everything is set over the spacious ground floor of the Berlin hotel location. ‘I wanted the space to be an open, shoppable private home for everyone to hang out in,’ Eagle said to T Magazine.

The Store by Alex Eagle at Soho House, Berlin

Suitcase Magazine has a great interview with Eagle where she talks about sourcing localized, new talent across the creative design industries.

Showrooming meets design

The worlds of interiors, design and even real estate are utilizing apartment-style showrooming to sell furniture and homewares.

For the newly renovated, but still off-plan central London Saint Martins Lofts scheme, gallerist and designer Marc Peredis has created a warm, minimalist show apartment, exclusively utilising pieces from artists represented in his Soho gallery, 19 Greek Street.

Saint Martins Lofts by Marc Peredis

Dutch architecture & design magazine Frame created a 3D rendition of its pages at a pop-up shop in the Felix Meritis building for Amsterdam’s temporary cultural festival, Felix & Foam, in 2014. The space, designed by Dutch studio i29, was intended to be a mirrored universe, using reflective surfaces to create a sensory, immersive shopping experience. Frame curated a mix of new talent from the design world, showcased in modernist room sets, set against the grand backdrop of the building’s 18th architecture. In a similar project last year, German online magazine Freunde von Freunden (FvF) furnished a Berlin flat as part of a 3D editorial project for Swiss furnishings manufacturer Vitra.

Frame Magazine at Felix & Foam

Freunde von Freunden Apartment for Vitra

Dining at home:

The idea of curating an ‘at home’ experience is also represented by restaurants, where patrons buy into the vision of the chef as much as the food.

At my favourite new restaurant and bar, Old Tom & English in London’s Soho, interior designer Lee Broom has created a décor very much an ode to British decadence from a bygone era. The idea was to replicate a 1960s living room, where diners come to join an intimate cocktail party and stay for nibbles.

Old Tom & English, Soho

Danish restaurant Noma in Copenhagen is currently having some time-out from serving food, instead focusing on translating its worldwide reputation into a retail experience. Earlier this year it opened a shoppable pop-up store in Tokyo, selling locally made tableware and furniture in collaboration with Japanese designer and creative director Sonya Park of Arts&Science. And last month, US retailer Club Monaco moved into Noma’s original Copenhagen space for a curated offering of its mens and womens collections as well as local New York-based furniture and homeware designs and vintage collectibles from around the world.

Club Monaco at Noma, Copenhagen

What does it all mean?

Designing retail or restaurant spaces that replicate a home environment takes customers a step closer to imagining a selection of curated products in their own living space. Plus, it’s the perfect antidote to 2D online shopping, making the most of showrooming as a tactile retail experience.

Here’s a round-up of January’s more interesting phygital retail bytes:

CES kick-starts the year with a host of innovative tech ideas and nascent, phygital developments to watch with retailers in mind. This year, wearables finally got exciting, the IoT (Internet of Things) got closer to reaching breaking point in our homes, and consumers saw how technology is ready to transform the shopping experience. My favourite round-ups from Bloomberg Business Week and Brand Channel touched on many key trends.

Estimote beacons

The Retail Big Show in New York closely follows CES, and the role of technology in stores increases with importance every year. This year, the show profiled eBay’s connected store concept, currently on trial at Rebecca Minkoff and Nordstrom stores, according to this report in Retail Design World, and magic mirrors were the top attraction according to Retailing Today’s review. Disruptive retail strategy was one of the show’s key take-outs for Retail Touchpoints while mobile apps that are enabling beacon technology uptake was top of the buzz list for CNBC.

Neiman Marcus has installed interactive inventory tables that blend into its footwear departments, and will spur sales conversions according to Luxury Daily.

Omni-channel is the word of 2015 for eBay, that has just launched its new sellers platform: Retail Associate Platform, according to WWD.

Mall rats are not dead, they are part of retail’s big phygital strategy, says Kevin McKenzie, Westfield’s global chief digital officer, who talks to the Business of Fashion about Westfield’s new World Trade Centre location in New York.

Virtual retail is a step closer thanks to Microsoft’s new Holo Lens headset. Here Dezeen suggests what might be possible.

Tommy Hilfiger has launched a digital showroom that is shaking up the fashion buying world.

Pinterest is gaining traction among advertisers as brands flock to the channel’s ‘Pinfluencers’, according to the Wall Street Journal. And stylish influential men are Pinterest’s new target, as the image curation site works on its search functionality with ‘geek’ content.

AdAge has a refreshing take on how Snapchat could kill the trend for consumer showrooming in stores via one-off snap coupons or scavenger hunt style retail promotions.

Fashion and beauty brands are combining user-generated content with discovery-commerce opportunites on Instagram. Joining the Insta-commerce party is Preen.Me, a platform that has recently run exclusive deals with Tweezerman and Bumble & Bumble, according to WWD (sub req).

A good pop-up still has its place and this one blends a few retail trends at once. For its launch onto the ‘premium high-street’, last week online fashion site Finery London opened a week-long pop-up showroom that mixed physical creativity with digital experimentalism.

Visitors to the tiny Greek Street store could see the label’s resort collection shown on a revolving carousel, set against a backdrop displaying the creative process behind the Finery London team’s design process, eg sketches, patterns, branding ideas. From the street, visitors could swipe through an interactive look book and find a discount code (for early bird shopping) hidden on a screen in the window using motion-sensing technology connected to their devices.

Finery London pop-up store

‘Creating an online audience can start just as effectively with an experience in the physical world, and for an online-only fashion brand like Finery London, we wanted to make the product tangible, visible and highly desirable to Londoners,’ says Thea Frost, partner at Somewhat, the digital agency responsible for the digital concept. ‘The interactive screen mechanic reminds visitors that Finery is a digital brand and allows them to browse as they would on the website,’ she adds.

After trialing the site among early adopters in December, Finery London launches properly on February 5th. With a team comprising of Caren Downie, ex-fashion director at ASOS, Rachel Morgan, former head womenswear buyer also at ASOS and Emma Farrow, until recently Topshop’s design director, the brand’s fashion-forward ethos is well considered. Farrow says Finery London has launched as an antidote to the current lack of femininity elsewhere on the high-street. ‘It’s about flattering the female form,’ she says adding the brand has a London feel but is ‘a little bit quirky and not too serious,’ according to a report on the Business of Fashion.

* This pop-up reflects the retail trend for interactive billboards, that is breathing new life into the pop-up genre. Finery London’s launch onto the market is a clever mix of creative storytelling and digital experimentalism. Showrooming retail tactics blend a physical presence with digital discovery- commerce. By encouraging early adopter shopping on the site through simple rewards, the campaign is a great example of how to utilise social-commerce from the word go.

The worlds of online and offline retail are merging with increasingly compelling examples of personalised product meets convenient service = winning combination.

Kate Spade eBay digital store front, New York

The phy-gital retail trend is here to stay, exemplified by early adopters such as eBay, Bonobos, FAB and more recently Etsy, Birchbox and the trailblazing eyewear specialist Warby Parker. These online pure-players have all dipped their digital toes in physical waters, opening showroom and pop-up style stores with largely successful results (Warby Parker says its eight stores sell an average $3,000 worth of product per square foot annually, according to the Wall Street Journal).

What’s interesting is that the phy-gital trend also works the other way. The flipside is that physical retailers are also enhancing the store experience with data-enriched shopping experiences that online retailers have been used to offering for years. As J Skyler Fernandes, MD of Simon Venture Group, said at the Wired Retail conference late last year, the mall is not dead, it just needs to embrace the digital natives that now shop there.

Now there are fresh innovations from online retailers that are taking the idea of showrooming to new levels.

Zappos wants to encourage customers to shop whenever, wherever and opened a 24/7 Holiday pop-up store in Las Vegas in partnership with e-commerce software specialist OrderWithMe. The showroom-style store mirrored what was available on the brand’s website and was a reference to the way consumers shop around the clock, globally. ‘You don’t go to Zappos.com at 3 am and they say, ‘We’re closed,” explained OrderWithMe CEO Jonathan Jenkins.

Zappos pop-up showroom with OrderWithMe

Virtual stores with physical locations are popping up in New York and London. I loved the 3D scan virtual store experiment from ShowStudio’s collaboration with MachineA in spring 2014, for its avant-garde approach to interactive retailing. More traditional in the showroom sense was the DL1961 digital denim pop-up that appeared in New York’s Meatpacking area for the Holiday period offering body-scanning, virtual fit advice and payment/delivery options in a single booth. ‘The DL1961 Digital Showroom is a way to take a product like ours that is based on touch and feel and translate it in a digital space,’ the brand’s creative director Sarah Ahmed told New York’s The Daily.

DL1961 digital showroom

As retail in 2015 re-invents itself courtesy of the digital age, physical stores and digital shopping habits will continue to merge. Personalisation, device-enhanced customer service and clever economies of scale such as localised click & collect (FarFetch is ahead of the curve on that one), will be the new rules of dynamic retailing. Virtual showrooming, billboards for store-fronts and data-crunching personal shoppers will all play a part in the phy-gitalisation of the retail experience in 2015.